Use Sony’s New Smart Agriculture Solution for Crop Management

With the introduction of ‘Smart Agriculture Solution’, Sony is taking its expertise in sensing & processing technology and is applying it to the agriculture business.  

The new solution helps in daily crop management as well as monitoring through the capture, collection, and analyzation of data in the meadow. It facilitates in-the-field operation without a network connection, unlike traditional or usual networked methods.  

These added insights will provide farmers the ability to easily supervise and manage the progress of their crops, allowing them to monitor the growth & health, make decisions, take necessary actions on the spot to boost productivity as well as efficiency, thus saving time and reducing costs.

Sony’s new Smart Agriculture Solution uses sensor fusion & fast stitching technology that consists of a newly developed drone-mounted multispectral sensing unit & Fast Field Analyzer image analysis software. The multispectral sensing unit carries a double sensor camera unit along with an accurate geolocation sensing unit. Moreover, it can be mounted on a drone to get hold of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) & RGB imagery in a single flight.

During a flight, this sensing unit gets highly accurate geolocation, altitude and position information leveraged by Sony’s unique algorithm & real-time processor while synching up geo data with every picture it captures. This lets the users to generate maps with Fast Field Analyzer by stitching captured data utilizing only geolocation data. It needs less overlapped pictures and as a result, it increases a single flight’s efficiency with a wider coverage area, allowing drones to collect 300 to 400 pictures covering a maximum range of 160 acres. All the processes are carried out in a fully offline environment that does not utilize time consuming cloud processing so that users can take instant action in the field with precise analysis results.

Highlights of the 2 elements:

1. Sony’s multispectral sensing unit (MSZ-2100G)

• Built-in dual sensor (NDVI/RGB)

• RGB : 2 inch / pixel @ 400ft flight

• NDVI - 6 inch per pixel @ 400ft flight

• Correct geo-tagged image capture

• Data capture to micro SD card

2. Sony’s Fast Field Analyzer image analysis software (FFA-PCW)

• Quick flight data quality confirmation before processing

• Fast stitching for generating NDVI or RGB map

• Numerous battery flight data import with a lone operation

• Easy to utilize graphical assessment tools for in-field decision making

During its progress, Sony had conducted a number of field investigation programs with the industry associates to firmly grab market issues & needs, together with Syngenta, a leading agriculture company that combines technology & research to enhance crop insights and outcomes. Syngenta chose Sony’s Smart Agriculture Solution as a part of its complete digital agriculture service. Syngenta and Sony are working closely together to offer compatibility between Sony’s Smart Agriculture Solution & Syngenta’s satellite imaging software for end-users’ convenience.

GM of New Segment Department, Professional Products & Solutions Group, Sony Imaging Products & Solutions Inc., Bruce Tanaka said, “We are happy to be able to offer an end-to-end solution leveraging our compelling technology to meet the requirements of the agriculture industry by increasing efficiency & productivity. We will continue to further improve this solution by working closely with allies like Syngenta with their industry knowledge and experience, as well as end users.”